Clearpath’s Blog on IT Infrastructure, Hybrid Clouds and IT Security

Earlier today, I went into vCloud Director to add a new Organization Network, only to find both my vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) Edge Gateways had failed. I went to redeploy, but ended up getting this error -

vCloud Director 5.1 was recently announced at VMworld 2012, and on September 10, vCloud Director 5.1 was officially released. Since many of you have existing vCloud Director 1.5 installations, here is a guide to help you upgrade to vCloud Director 5.1.

This isn’t a subject that comes up everyday, but I’ve seen it enough times that I thought it warranted a quick write up, so here we go. The biggest problem is that typically when you see a named instance of MS SQL installed, it’s alongside the default (MSSQLSERVER). For most applications, this isn’t an issue. You connect up to the named instance by giving the application or ODBC connection syntax similar to ‘SERVER\INSTANCE’, and it works just fine; however, with vCloud Director, which uses Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) to connect to MS SQL, this doesn’t quite work. JDBC doesn’t seem to be able to handle dynamic ports, at least with MS SQL 2008 R2 and vCloud Director 1.51, so we either have to add a secondary network interface or give your named instance a different TCP port. In this article, we’ll take the second approach.

VMworld 2010 in San Francisco, CA - all the hype this year is around VMware's vCloud Director, and with good reason. This new technology will enable vCloud Service Providers to deploy true federated cloud services to organizations looking to augment their environments with cloud-based services.